Soteriophobia and Snark
sound and fury, a high school au
I shut my eyes tightly and pull out another stitch, invented arguments echoing inside my pounding head.
I can't stand myself sometimes. Making a dress for the girl who doesn't thank me or say hi or acknowledge me half the time. I'm a puppy, running after her, and she...
...seems to return the affection, in her own...
...strange way.
Does she?
This dress was made in angry defiance over eight days and it was thirty-two hours of hell. It was hell because I sewed until my fingers were torn open and raw, hand-sewed just to make her smile, because I broke my machine trying to make everything perfect. In repayment, not one of the days did she say hello to me. She just waltzed in twenty minutes late with her backpack flapping open, papers and pens and her mumbled curses spilling everywhere amid the chastisement of various teachers.
Look at what I did. I bled for you, I want to whisper, holding up my red hands like a child with a good grade. Give me a gold star.
The crickets outside continue their scratchy orchestra as I lean closer to the shimmery fabric, imagining every stitch yanked through that Tavros kid's head.
(Why him...? I know you could do better... you could have picked someone like-)
I throw the scissors, the nearest sturdy item, across the room, where they sail out my open window. I suddenly have the vicious, out-of-character wish that I had smashed the glass, made it feel like I feel now.
(-someone like-)
My heart aches for something I can't identify and all I want now is for Vriska to come and sweep me away in her arms into a land where I don't have to worry about school or the fact that it's three A.M. or dances or Tavros or dates or jealousy.
(well... someone like...
...me.)
I try to keep my distance.
Do you hate me? I almost say a million times, watching the arch of her neck speak in lieu of her words:
Perhaps.
When the teacher says "Maryam" she says "Here" in a tone that drips with authority and venom, and when she passes me in the hallways she sniffles coldly and turns away, clearly with a modus operandi: I am stubborn because you refuse to greet me and thus I shall not greet you.
My dreams are troubled with memories and fragments of people I know but somehow have forgotten, and although my arm's constant, dull pain keeps me from drifting too far away, I feel lost anyway.
I lean against the kitchen counter and tilt my head back, taking a messy sip of vodka. I idly notice that I lost the cork for the bottle, hate myself lingeringly, and continue drinking straight from the container without even pouring it into a glass. I gulp the bitterness like a convicted criminal gulps the inevitable truth: without wincing, angrily finding fault with everything between swallows, pondering death and hypocrisy.
What do I live for, Kanaya? I want to shake the girl's shoulders and yell in her face, emotional and passionate, and then stare at her with feeling, not with cheesy feeling but with Shakespeare feeling. I want to dance with her again, once more captivated by the jade-green eyes that have become my twin ghosts, ever-present in fact and fiction.
I fear that she'll turn away and answer so chillingly that frost will froth at her pretty lips:
I don't know, Serket.
I don't know.
"Psttt."
Through my delirium, I can make out the features of a girl standing by the window seat.
"Whazza..." My skin prickles with gooseflesh, warning me to be alert, and winter cold suddenly fills my room at a speed that is, to my poor waking body, entirely too fast.
"It's me."
Vriska Serket (who else?!) stares at me from inside my side of the window, which she has somehow climbed into (it's on the second story! How did she even...)
"Go away," I force my eyes open more and choke through my tongue, but Vriska presses close anyway until she's right next to my bed, her cerulean eyes swirling with a desperate question.
"Do you hate me?"
I'm baffled by her words; they come to me as if in a cloud, faint and watery on my skin with the feeling of the night air.
"What?"
Vriska leans close, until I could probably count her eyelashes. Her breath is sour, like metal and wire, but it's strangely alluring, almost dangerous.
"Do you hate me?!" Her voice rises to a level I have never heard before, and she seizes the back of my head and tilts it up to meet hers.
"...No... I don't hate you."
She scrutinizes my face carefully.
"I don't hate you." I say it again, unnecessarily.
"Well, you should," Vriska Serket tangles her right hand's fingers in my hair and crushes her lips to mine with a fervor that I cannot try to understand, so I don't try and instead attempt to kiss back. Her mouth burns mine, and tastes exactly of her breath, alcoholic and nerve-wracking. It pairs just right with the involvement of her teeth, clicking against my own, and when her tongue, a curious little soft shape, prods my lower lip, I shiver.
"Do you still not undislike me?" the beautiful girl demands after two breathless minutes, pulling away and tossing a curtain of white-blonde hair from her eyes.
"Your double negatives confuse me," I smile. My abdomen feels a bit like there are melting organs inside of it somewhere when she smirks.
"Don't play me for a fool, or you, don't play you for a fool either, fool."
She trips over her words gracefully, and ends up stammering curses in a somewhat adorable fashion.
ARE WE FLIRTING?!, I think, and I actually say it aloud, apparently, because she laughs.
"Yes. Sure. Sure, flirtingiggiggig is fun. Nunununnun. Fun. Like the roller slide..."
"Vriska, you're drunk," I manage to say before she gives me a hard kiss.
"Shup up," is mumbled, and I, my cheeks bright red, oblige.
"Oh God it's good so addictive," she adds after another minute or so has passed and she has to stop to pant for air.
"Vriska. Vriska, please. Have sense," is what I know I need to say, but all I can do is stare at the blue-eyed perfection. She's clearly intoxicated, but regardless she's endearing, even angelic, in the absence of light. Her silhouette bends and bows like a shadow-puppet's, and her smile follows in the same back-and-forth motion, triumphant and slippery.
"Sleepy time," she yawns and nuzzles into my neck, pushing me down so she can have a large portion of the bed.
I'm too tired to argue.
